Review Insignificance

Insignificance
by Terry Johnson

Starry, Starry Night
https://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Who is imagining whom in Terry Johnson's flirtatiously symbolic 1982 piece Insignificance where Hollywood, politics, science and professional sport all collide?

On an evening in 1954 in a New York hotel room, the heavy-drinking Senator (Tom Mannion) is confronting the German-born Professor (Simon Rouse), denigrating him as a "Yid".

However, the politician is shrewd enough in his small-minded way to understand the capital to be had from the celebrity scientist's attendance to promote the profile of the House Of UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings.

And after the senator temporarily leaves, whoosh! In blows the platinum blonde actress (Alice Bailey Johnson). She, in turn, is eventually pursued by her heavy-hitter, in all senses of the word, sportsman husband (Oliver Hemborough).

It is of course rather disingenuous of your starstruck reviewer, who is not even  a front for anybody's organisation or cartel 😉, to leave the characters unnamed.

Except she is following the example of the playwright. For Johnson carefully keeps his toolbox of characters representative, cherry picking and jumbling details of many lives hooked in to the recognizable celebrity images who inhabit the space-time continuum in the play's Manhattan hotel room.

In this 1950s' parallel universe we cannot know if we are confronted by the spitting images of or the "real" Nobel prize winning scientist Albert Einstein,  Hollywood sex bomb Marilyn Monroe and legendary sportsman Joe DiMaggio.

Meanwhile the 1950s' villain-in-chief Senator Joe McCarthy sometimes also has difficulty separating the Hollywood double from the real thing.

Are we to believe it is a biographical episode? Is it a honeytrap using a Hollywood sex symbol to force a chain reaction for the naming of names during the Red Scare?

What is significant and what is insignificant?

Originally premièred at the Royal Court directed by Lee Waters with Judy Davis, Ian McDiarmid, Larry Lamb and William Hootkins, some aspects of Insignificance now feel dated.

The concept of starry icons brought down to earth is no longer a novel one. Bio-plays and films are now all the rage. In our internet age, imagining encounters between famous people in out-of-character circumstances does not feel outrageous.

Still, Johnson's kaleidoscope still does have something to say in our times where the precarious nature of America's celebrity shop window royalty is even more apparent.

However David Mercatali's production seems uncertain and is uneven in quality.   

The first act has some wavering accents and an opaque scientific (literally) Mickey Mouse demonstration which doesn't completely convince. To be fair, though, we are generations on from audiences knowing Walt Disney truly once was the conveyor of popular science to the masses, so maybe some of the double-edgedness is lost.

The cast feels much more at home with the emotional truths of the second act than the caricatural media images of the first.

However one act needs to bat against the other, politically, historically and dramatically, for the play to succeed. In short, the chain reaction doesn't consistently spark here and it's an amber light.

Review Food

A tale of sibling love and rivalry set in a Tasmanian chippy is a sizzling success for reviewer Peter Barker.

Food
by Steve Rodgers

Deep Fried Emotions
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Funny, dark and provocative Food by Australian Steve Rodgers fixes on women, sisterhood, growing up and sex with a firmly adult gaze. A gaze which also, of course, includes food. 

A three-hander, originally performed in Sydney in 2012, this is a skilfully-crafted one-act piece, a rite-of-passage play for two sisters in their twenties, a drama that's bleak yet finally filled with hope. 

Former wild child Nancy (Lily Newbury-Freeman)  has returned to the country town of her childhood. She and her stay-at-home sister Elma (Emma Playfair) cannot escape each other.

Still, Nancy spearheads a plan to transform their fish and chip takeaway on a Tasmanian outback highway into a sit-down eatery.

Into this world of food preparation, business expansion and sibling rivalry, yet also sisterly bonds, walks a charismatic Turkish backpacker, Hakan (Scott Karim).

Elma is quick to demonstrate to him  the fate of “bullshitters with wandering hands” utilizing a knife, named after a family matriarch.  However after he becomes hired hand, the sexual temperature within the kitchen soars.    

There are well-defined, detailed performances from Australian actors Newbury-Freeman as Nancy and Playfair as Elma. They manage to draw the audience viscerally into every tussle, even when raised voices and accents are at their loudest and broadest.

We warm equally to Karim's deliberately irritating but engaging performance - the testosterone-driven outsider both to the simmering sibling rivalry and to the Australian island.   

Structured over 90 minutes in the present and as a series of teenage childhood flashbacks, director Cressida Brown's traverse staging allows for intimacy and even for the performers to interact effortlessly with the audience.

While director Brown’s production is tight and quick moving, it still could have cut 10 minutes and lost nothing. Nevertheless, it remains constantly compelling.

Richard Williamson's highly effective lighting, Jon McLeod's sound and movement director Ita O'Brien's additions all evoke the sense of location and emotional intensity.

Hannah Wolfe cleverly keeps the design simple and fluid on an adaptable, multi-layered set with ladder and the heavy duty kitchen and catering props on wheels.

Food, both darkly raw and bright, has all the ingredients of a satisfying and thought-provoking drama.

It's a green light for a piece using food and sex to convey complex family ties alongside social and emotional challenges.

Review Rotterdam

Rotterdam
by Jon Brittain

Crossing The Boundaries  
https://www.artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

Alice loves Fiona - known as Fi, pronounced "fee" - but she hesitates about telling her parents. Fi loves Alice but she would also love to be another person.

The dislocated expat crowd around them in Holland's major port includes Alice's ex-boyfriend, Josh, who is something in IT.

And of course, Holland being Holland, this is a translingual play, as well as transgender drama, with the Dutch speaking fluent Dutch offstage (naturally) and fluent English onstage (according to the British characters, unnaturally naturally).

This includes blonde lesbian Lelani, the ultra-cool Dutch shipping firm colleague who draws close as Alice on the rebound bounces around like a helium-filled party balloon.

We may never learn the Dutch for "shipping contract". However this comedy drama has a stellar, pitch perfect characterization from Alice McCarthy as Alice, a demure and businesslike perfectionist even when she turns wild.

Anna Martine Freedman matches her as the firmly proactive and initially certain Fiona, although, we learn, she badly misjudges her options and the reactions of those around her.

Ed Eales-White as techie Josh, straining at the leash to leave, and Ellie Morris as Alice's zany shipping firm Dutch co-worker, Lelani are equally strong in the supporting roles.    

With writer Jon Brittain's spry, well-focussed first act plot, there's both acid drop wit and laugh-out-loud moments. There's also a cheekily pert and colourful design by Ellan Parry and precise, inventive direction by Donnacadh O'Briain showing visual and oral dexterity.

The second act feels less organic and more stretched out to reach the desired ending. A character announcing, "It's a metaphor" tipped what had been a quivering in-between story, in more ways than one, over a clunkily explicit edge.

However this prescient play. first produced in 2015 at Theatre503, has a knowing simplicity and also caught a zeitgeist. It cleverly stirs in a now recognisable bitter Brexit-like uncertainty into a psychedelic syrup of sexual and economic issues and it's a green light.

Review New Nigerians

New Nigerians
by Oladipe Agboluaje

Trading Places
http://www.arcolatheatre.com 

An ebullient if uneven satire has landed in Hackney in the shape of New Nigerians, a dissection of political jockeying for power and deal making in Africa's most populous and oil-rich country. 

We enter this world through presidential hopeful Greatness Ogholi (Patrice Naiambana) practising his speech as the sole socialist candidate and reaching beyond the stage, speaking directly to the audience to bolster his electoral support and dream of a united Nigeria standing behind him.

The practicalities are handled by a savvy pot-smoking female colleague Chinasa (Gbemisola Ikumelo) with her own virtual Twitter and familial power base, holding her own in her inimitable way despite the male-dominated set up.

Meanwhile Ogholi finds himself thrashing out a pact with rival party businessman politician Danladi Musa, once a mortal enemy, and union leader Comrade Edobor (both played by Tunde Euba) to gain power. But he always has nationalisation, free healthcare and free education cemented in as cornerstones of his political agenda.

Briskly directed by Rosamunde Hutt, this is a garrulous, atmospheric play and production, almost bursting at the seams, resource-rich with issues, events, ideas and setbacks besetting an emerging economy.

Ironically Nigeria's name was coined by a female journalist, a distant cousin of playwright Bernard Shaw. For behind the gaudy facade and broad humour, Oladipe Agboluaje has written a quasi-Shavian play of ideas, ideals versus expediency.

Ogholi's ideals become a drill in political rhetoric,  "It is time we see our elite for what they are: a parody of our Western counterparts, rentiers and middlemen who sell off all our resources ..." But at the same time, the parody works as a two-way mirror, with echos within the play of a leadership deal allegedly struck over restaurant napkins for 'an electable candidate' in the much smaller country which was once Nigeria's colonial master.

Using our old ally Google, we also find the play is bang up-to-the-date about Nigeria: minimum wage, the foreign currency squeeze after the fall in petroleum prices. As well as on-going issues and trends such as the health travails of the President, Boko Haram, the threat of breakaway states, the division between Islam, Christianity and the atheism of the old radical left, the position of girls and women, the rise of hashtag online politics overtaking even the offline intersection of football and politics.

We do have our own particular issue over Chinasa's supposed enjoyment of a sexual practice converted into a gag but this may be part of a drug haze male delusion. Structurally also the play sometimes seems to lose its way in its effort to cover a lot of ground and run Ogholi's marital problems as a parallel plot, but it is redeemed by the brio of the characters and the vitality of the subject matter.

If the meaning of the term 'new world order' has always been nebulous, surely many imagined after the collapse of the Soviet bloc that the nation state and supra-national organisations would fill the vacuum.

Instead, many would say, the current state of flux is more in tune with Margaret Thatcher's comment, in hindsight double-edged, in the 1980s equivalent of a twitter feed, magazine Woman's Own: 'There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first'.

New Nigerians stays energetically in the African context as a reflection on the state of the world. It's certainly raw and not without its flaws but it's an amber/green light for its vigorous embrace of matters which affect us all.

Review Thebes Land

Thebes Land
by Sergio Blanco
Translated and adapted by Daniel Goldman
Based on a literal translation by Roberto Cavazos 

An Immodest Proposal
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Before the days when TLT had her own little theatre reviewing jalopy to transport her, she well remembers the trudge to Belmarsh from Plumstead station. At the time, TLT was a press agency reporter and Belmarsh is not only a high security jail but also part of a complex including Belmarsh magistrates' and Woolwich crown court.

So that shows TLT is well-qualified to review a show created by Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco which centres, in this translation and adaptation by director Daniel Goldman, on visits to a Belmarsh Prison inmate. And you should of course take every one of TLT's words as gospel. 😇

Thebes Land, we are told, originated as an attempt to give an authentic audience experience - a lifer convicted of murdering his father, on stage in a cage at the Arcola Theatre after a commission by an off-stage character called Mehmet Ergen.

That authenticity apparently was eventually undermined by the authorities withdrawing permission. So an actor Freddie replaces prisoner Martin (both embodied by actor Alex Austin) to act out a script put together by the increasingly odd and fussy playwright "T" (Trevor White).

If it sounds somewhat far-fetched, well we think it's meant to be. Imagine the headlines in the newspapers if a serving prisoner, a murderer to boot, were allowed on a London stage, given a platform to voice his views, even pre-scripted, and then paid a fee. Compare the uproar over possible profits for Mary Bell, the family of Fred West and fee-charging government public servants out of literary exploitation. 

As you may have guessed, and will definitely realise if you are sitting in the audience, this is all a fiction with "T", a forty-something career playwright, serving as the unreliable narrator, inquisitor, and maybe even implicit self-ordained father figure.

Not only unreliable but as the piece goes on (and it does go on for about two and half hours), he and his presentation to us of Martin definitely gets weirder and weirder, imbued by an over-active literary and art history imagination. The writer "T" may well be totally bonkers.

In fact, read this carefully, we will say this only once - this play seems constructed so that "T" seems less a writer - even if he draws on, amongst others, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Franz Kafka, an apparent Wikipedia entry on the fork, Whitney Houston, a popular Mozart piano concerto, a song by the Foals. a quote from French philosopher Georges Bataille,  a paraphrasing of FIBA basketball rules, the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, Roland Barthes, Freud and Sophocles's Oedipus plays  - but an actor taking on the persona of a writer and still succeeding in the playwriting world of the play.

So "T" tells us he meets prisoner Martin at Belmarsh in court. Not one of those courts to which TLT used to trudge, but a basketball court. In a cage. Watched on cameras by prison wardens.

Does HMP Belmarsh have a basketball court or is it purely a snatch from American television prison dramas, we indeed wondered? After a google on the internet, yes indeed, since at least 2014 HMP Belmarsh has a basketball court. They've obviously watched those American serials as well.

However we are quite willing to countenance also that there is maybe something to be said about the gambling competitive tactics of the sports field and the adversarial nature of courts, if that is the reason for placing the meeting there. But in any case we are in danger of overweening pride in our ability to google and our multi-faceted superior knowledge of human nature 😉.

So we have to confess: We have read Crime and Punishment but not the Brothers Karamazov and didn't know until we googled that its author, Dostoevsky, suffered from epilepsy; We didn't know the origins of the fork; We've never been overly keen on Whitney Houston; We'd never heard of the Foals; We'd only vaguely heard of Georges Bataille and, we hang our head in shame, our knowledge of basketball rules was formerly confined only to the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon.  

"T", who admits his moniker is deliberately Kafkaesque (Hurrah, we possess and have read the Penguin complete short stories and novels!), nevertheless doesn't admit to a sense of humour, Kafkaesque or otherwise. Even though we are invited to laugh at his asssumptions and pretensions as he whips out his notebook to note down his subject's (or is it his object's?) words.

There's a glance at the tug of war between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice (although it leaves out the ambiguous feudal role of the Lord Chancellor). The constant mention of the governor, we realised, is a tease in itself. There are various types of governor in a prison. So without actually lying, our playwright is possibly hoodwinking us into thinking his contact is the highest in the hierarchy. But to what end? 

The problem with any such satire, for that is what it surely is, is that it is in danger of becoming that which it seeks to deconstruct especially as it relies on a certain background knowledge.

The unreliable narrator, the playful undermining narrative, the attempt at documentary authenticity is of course nothing new. It's the stuff of many a centuries' old novel and many a students' conversation into the wee small hours.

But we're now in the age of the internet, of "fake news",  where we can be suspicious and gullible, trickster and tricked, all at the same time. And it made us wonder whether this play was fundamentally anti democratic. Surely in our times it is possible to find a new form or adapt an old structure in a manner rather more generous towards its audience and less secretive about its politics and literary allusions than in a previous more censored age.

Of course in the old days of Cold War censorship, pre-internet, it was much simpler. The audience of the oppressed was more homogenous, shared a common vocabulary and metaphors could bring a satisfying urgency, immediacy and catharsis.

We don't know, naturally, how much is Sergio Blanco and how much has been added and subtracted in translation and adaptation. The acting is committed, detailed and altogether excellent but the premise feels well-worn and, despite a glance towards digital content at the end, rather dated in its concept.

We did perk up at the mention of press censorship, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

We were waiting for some clever development of this and also the possible influence of American dramas. reality TV and television drama in general on the justice system.  Which may be there but, if so, it's vastly diluted in an overlong piece.

As it is, the play seems to remain very much mired in the process and drawbacks of verbatim playwriting and workshopping, a certain type of bureaucratic artistic creation (fuelled, in part, some would say, by the turning of writing and acting into over-subscribed, impossibly competitive mass graduate professions).  In other words, not particularly engrossing for a general audience, unlike, for example, Edmund White's prison drama Terre Haute which we remember enjoying some years ago and which, we suspect, would stand the test of time.

We guess if the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (gosh, we had to google hard to find that latest incarnation of the old Department of Trade and Industry!) had put pressure on us to award our most coveted rating for the sake of cheap oil, we would have had to submit for the sake of the nation. 😉  As it is, it's an amber light for a play, the content of which would have been far more persuasive if it were shorter and any wit compressed.